McCarthy's The Road (Post 3, Question 5)

5. McCarthy's novel is a stark contrast to Kerouac's in terms of language. While Kerouac is lyrical, loud, and colorful, McCarthy's style is dark and sparse. How does McCarthy's style lend to the story itself? Cite text for support. Who is his audience? How can you tell?

McCarthy's style is indeed dark and sparse. I couldn't think of anything but the color gray (and occasionally red) while reading it. We start off with gray clouds, then to the raining ash, then to the burnt forests.
I looked at the Wikipedia article for the book, and kind of laughed when I read the section called "Environmentalist response". It talks about how some guy thought the book was "the most environmental book ever", simply because if you picture the United States as it's described in the novel, you would do anything to prevent the complete destruction of the biosphere and ecosystem.
Somehow I don't think McCarthy was thinking of saving the planet when he wrote the book, so I'll get back on track.
McCarthy clearly didn't use proper MLA formatting for the novel...the most noticeable being the lack of quotation marks, and commas. The Father and Son rarely speak in sentences longer than 3 words. This attributes to the setting of the novel...being barron, empty, bare--though not necessarily passionless. In fact, the compassion between the father & son is the only real light/love/fire to the novel. If I were to describe the son in one word, I would say innocent. I don't think I would have said that without the minimal sentences and perhaps his most common word in the book, "okay".

-Andrew Suzuki